A Louisiana prison committed one of the most blatant violations of a person’s religious freedom to ever reach the Supreme Court.
Damon Landor is a Rastafari who, for religious reasons, does not cut his hair – according to his lawyers, he kept this vow for more than two decades, until his dreadlocks grew almost long enough to reach his knees. But then, in 2020, while he was serving a five-month sentence for a drug-related offense, prison officials. he handcuffed him to a chair, put him down and shaved his head.
Ironically, when Landor was transferred to the prison where this forced shaving took place, he brought a a copy of the federal appeals court decisionwhich held that it violates federal religious freedom law for Louisiana prisons to cut the hair of Rastafarian inmates, at least when those inmates want to keep it longer for religious reasons. But, when Landor presented this decision to the prison guards, they threw it in the trash and shaved his head anyway.
And yet, in his 6-3 decision in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safetythat the Supreme Court issued on Tuesday, the Republican majority on the Court held that Landor has no recourse against the prison officials, despite their clear violation of federal religious freedom law.
The majority of Republicans on the Court are usually very sympathetic to religious liberty petitioners, especially when the plaintiffs are Christians. So Landor it is a break from this Court’s broader efforts to read the religious freedom statute broadly. It is unclear why the Republican justices departed from their usual pattern of favoring religious plaintiffs, although one explanation is that. Landor it could undermine civil rights and public health laws that Republicans oppose.
Judge Neil Gorsuch’s decision for him and his fellow Republicans hinges on a stark contrast between how the federal law at issue in this case, The Law on the Use of Religious Land by Institutionalized Persons of the year 2000 (RLUIPA), was drafted, and how it could be written to protect people like Landor. In theory, Landor There is no limit to the power of Congress to protect religious freedom – or any other right. But it requires Congress to write the law in a way that Gorsuch favors.
In fact, it’s not even clear that Gorsuch’s views are wrong. Most federal appeals courts agree with Gorsuch’s approach to this case. So, one of the confusing questions embedded in the Landor decision is why the Court decided to hear this case to begin with. Why take on a case involving horrors, if all the judges were supposed to do was confirm the existing law? They could just let the lower court’s decision, which also ended in a loss for Landor, stand.
Instead, the judges decided to put their dignity behind the shocking, if legally defensible, decision. Landor. The question is why.
One possible reason is that the Court Landor decision has the potential to resolve the ongoing dispute over whether women in red states can receive an emergency abortionif it is necessary to save their life or prevent serious health consequences. Although federal law requires hospitals to perform these emergency abortions, Gorsuch’s comments in Landor could overturn that law — at least in states where abortion is illegal.
The majority of Republicans on the Court often read the law in ways that are inconsistent with its precedents when doing so. close access to abortion. Additionally, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson internal resistance Landor lists other federal laws, including one to protect nursing home residents, that could be weakened by Gorsuch’s comments.
In any case, the immediate effect of the Court’s most recent decision is that Landor has no remedy, despite the fact that his religious freedom rights were clearly violated.
So what is the specific legal dispute Landor?
As Gorsuch acknowledges, RLUIPA prohibits state prison systems that receive federal funding from “keeping”heavy load on religious exercise(s).‘ of state prisoners outside of exceptional circumstances.” There is no question that, by forcefully shaving Landor’s head, the Louisiana prison system violated RLUIPA.
But Landor sought more than just a judicial declaration that his rights had been violated; he accused the prison officials who shaved his head, saying that they should be responsible for him. Gorsuch’s opinion maintains that these officials are immune from paying monetary damages to Landor.
To reach this result, Gorsuch adjusts to the fact that RLUIPA does not directly regulate prisons or prison guards. Instead, it imposes conditions on state prisons that accept state subsidies. The prisons are free to refuse the money if they want, but if they do take the money, they must comply with the religious freedom protections of RLUIPA.
This arrangement, Gorsuch says, is akin to a contract, and thus can only bind the parties who agree. While the state prison where Landor was incarcerated agreed to comply with RLUIPA, Gorsuch claims, the prison staff did not. And so they cannot be sued individually for violating RLUIPA.
On the surface, this is a bit of a limitation, because Gorsuch also writes that Congress could hold prison guards accountable for people like Landor. if it has written RLUIPA slightly differently. “Congress,” Gorsuch writes, “could have said that, as a condition of federal funding for the LDOC, its officials had to agree to enter into separate agreements with the federal government agreeing to sue under RLUIPA.” Or “it may have put its money on the Louisiana deal” to enact a state law allowing inmates to sue prison guards who violate RLUIPA.
If the United States had a functioning Congress, it could amend RLUIPA tomorrow.
Indeed, Gorsuch makes such a fine distinction that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spends much of his dissent arguing that his Republican colleagues should have cut Congress more. “The Court’s decision appears to be based on dissatisfaction with the way Congress created RLUIPA,” Jackson writes to himself and his fellow Democrats. He adds that “this hairsplitting ignores the lawmaking prerogative of Congress; we should not substitute our basic treaty privileges for the considered legislative structure of Congress.”
Appropriately, however, lower court judges have largely favored Gorsuch’s formalism over Jackson’s logical approach. As Louisiana said in his in short for the judgesmultiple federal appeals courts have held that inmates like Landor are not allowed to sue prison officials for monetary damages. So, time Landor While the decision may shock non-lawyers, it is not surprising to anyone who has followed this case closely.
Landor it will probably have very negative consequences for women who need abortions to save their lives
Given this consensus among the lower courts, it is strange that the Court decided to hear this case at all. If the Court were to reverse Landor’s request to ask the jury to consider his case separately, the lower court’s decision against him would stand, but the Republican judges would avoid the embarrassment of having to sign their names to obtain such a seemingly unfair result.
One possible explanation for the Court’s decision to take Landorhowever, it is likely to allow them to avoid the ongoing controversy over a more controversial issue: abortion.
Federation Emergency Medical and Labor Law (EMTALA), requires hospitals that accept Medicare funding (which is almost every hospital in the United States) to provide “treatment that may be necessary to improve the medical condition” of “any person” who arrives at the hospital’s ER with a “medical emergency.”
EMTALA does not discriminate against abortion. Therefore, under the text of EMTALA, federal law essentially requires hospitals to perform emergency abortions. EMTALA also states that state and local laws are superseded by the provisions of EMTALA.”to the extent that (state law) directly conflicts with the requirements of this section.” Red states, in other words, cannot prevent hospitals from performing emergency abortions required by federal law.
However, Idaho refused to comply with EMTALA, and the dispute over whether Idaho’s broad abortion ban could prevent emergency abortions reached the Supreme Court. Moyle v. United States (2024).
Although most of the judges voted against it Moyle case without deciding it, Judge Samuel Alito wrote a different opinions which closely resembles Gorsuch’s comments in Landor. (Gorsuch joined much of Alito’s opposition.)
Alito said that, like RLUIPA, EMTALA works like a contract — hospitals receive government funding, and in return agree to perform certain medical procedures. But the state of Idaho, Alito argued, is not as much a part of this agreement as the prison guards Landor did not agree to be bound by the provisions of RLUIPA. And so the government did not agree to have its broad ban on abortion with the provisions of EMTALA.
After Landorit is now clear that Alito’s position should control Moyle. Well, after Landorlower courts are likely to reject attempts to enforce EMTALA against red states, saving Republican judges the trouble of overturning EMTALA’s protections for women who need emergency abortions themselves.
And so, after that, women in red states who need emergency abortions to save their lives will just die.
